Alex is a neuroscientist whose research focuses on understanding the pathophysiology of nerve injury and neuropathic pain. He completed his PhD training in neurophysiology with Professor R. Alan North at the University of Manchester, UK. As a Junior Research Fellow at Seoul National University in South Korea his work led to discoveries in spinal mechanisms of neuropathic pain, a clinically-relevant treatment for dental pain, and a novel immune mechanism of axon degeneration after peripheral nerve injury. Since moving to the University of Oxford, he has developed methods to study human neuro-immune interactions in vitro with clinical translatability. As a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Alex and his team uses a combination of in vitro co-culture systems and immune phenotyping, with both mouse and human cells, to study cellular immune interactions in the peripheral nerve and their implications for sensory nerve function. The Davies lab are currently studying patients with ‘sciatica’ to understand the role of cellular cytotoxicity in immune-mediated recovery from traumatic nerve injury, and were recently awarded funding from the Medical Research Foundation to investigate the mechanisms of neuropathic pain during immunotherapy for neuroblastoma, the most common childhood cancer in under-fives. Alex’s long-term goals are to translate his lab’s biological discoveries into novel immune therapies for neuropathic pain.